Pfc. Brandon Neely worked as a miitary guard at Guantanamo when the detention camp opened ten years ago today. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Neely)

This report was originally published on Truthout and written by Jason Leopold.

Pfc. Brandon Neely was standing at attention inside Camp X-Ray along with three-dozen or so other active-duty soldiers attached to the 401st Military Police Company from Fort Hood, Texas, during the afternoon of January 11, 2002.

A busload of about 20 “enemy combatants” captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan were soon going to be arriving at the crudely constructed prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and Neely, then 21 years old, was waiting for his assignment.

His platoon sergeant called out his name.

“Pfc. Neely! Bravo Block, escort,” he said, which meant Neely escorted detainees as they were processed into the prison and then to their cells.

Outside the Law

A couple of weeks earlier, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained why the Bush admnistrtion settled on Guantanamo as a prison facility for “war on terror” detainees.

“I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected,” Rumsfeld said during a December 27, 2001 press briefing. “It has disadvantages, as you suggest. Its disadvantages, however, seem to be modest relative to the alternatives.”

Rumsfeld did not reveal to reporters that a young Justice Department attorney named John Yoo had just finished writing a legal memo that he sent to Pentagon General Counsel William “Jim” Haynes a day later that said Guantanamo was the perfect place location beacuse it was outside the law and it was unlikely US courts would grant detainees habeas corpus rights. Yoo’s analysis was proved wrong nearly a decade later when the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Boumediene v. Bush granting Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus rights.

Bush administration officials had at one point considered detaining prisoners in Guam, but Justice Department lawyers determined that detainees would be able to challenge their detention in US courts because, as Joseph Hansen wrote in his fascinating book about the history of Guantanamo, Guam would not be immune from federal court oversight and could be accessed by lawyers and journalists

The other dirty secret Rumsfeld did not disclose to the media was that Guantanamo was the ideal long-term interrogation facility the US could use to torture detainees.

Indeed, around the same time Rumsfeld was discussing Guantanamo as a detention center Haynes and other agency officials contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which runs Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) schools for teaching US soldiers to resist interrogation and torture if captured by an outlaw regime. The officials wanted a list of interrogation techniques that could be used for detainee “exploitation,” according to a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Three former military officiasl have referred to Guantanamo as a “battle lab,” meaning the interrogation methods detainees were experimental in nature.

“Worst of the Worst”

Neely’s adrenaline was flowing. Army Col. Terry Carrico, the prison’s commander, and Marine Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, commander, Joint Task Force 160, whose mission was to build and operate the detention camps at Guantanamo, had just told Neely and the other military police (MP) that all of the detainees, who Bush administration officials had publicly characterized as the “worst of the worst,” were involved in the 9/11 attacks and were so dangerous and psychotic that one of them had attempted to gnaw through a hydraulic line on the C-141 en route to Guantanamo.

Neely said he had no idea what to expect. He had never seen terrorists before. He was scared and nervous.

“I really wanted to be in combat fighting in Afghanistan,” Neely said. “I wanted revenge for 9/11. When I found out I was going to Guantanamo to help run a detention facility I was kind of mad because I wanted to go to the front lines to fight not to babysit a bunch of detainees.”

He waited for the bus to arrive near the open-air cages that resembled dog kennels, where the detainees were held for about four months before being moved to Camp Delta, a newly constructed block of prison cells built by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, a corporation once headed by Dick Cheney.

“I remember it was a sunny day,” Neely said. “It was January, but it was a lot different than Texas.”

The bus rolled in to the side of Camp X-Ray and the doors opened. The MP canine unit was present and their dogs were snarling. The first detainee to exit, a man Neely recalls was in his 30s and overweight, was missing a leg. A Marine inside the bus threw the man’s prosthetic leg onto the gravel. The MPs nicknamed him “Stumpy.”

That was Neely’s first exposure to the “worst of the worst.”

“I was shocked,” Neely said. “I will never forget that.”

The one-legged detainee hopped toward the holding area flanked by a couple of MPs who were screaming at him to “walk faster,” Neely said. The detainee was wearing an orange jumpsuit; goggles, which were designed to disorient his senses during the flight to Guantanamo from Afghanistan; a surgical mask; earmuffs; and gloves that looked like oven mitts. His leg, at least the one he still had, was shackled. His hands were attached to a chain wrapped around his torso.

The second detainee off the bus was David Hicks, the Australian drifter who was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and sold to US forces for about $1,500. [Hicks, who was released in 2007, gave his first interview to Truthout last year.]

Hicks was Neely’s prisoner. At five-foot three inches tall, he hardly looked like the mercenary about which Neely was warned.

“We yelled at him, told him to get on his knees and shut up,” Neely said after Hicks exited the bus. “He was a little guy. He didn’t look like a killer.”

Neely did not know it then, nor did the public, but a vast majority of the prisoners who populated Guantanamo during the prison’s first year in operation were innocent bystanders sold to US forces for hefty bounty payments or were captured and sent to Guantanamo because they wore the same style Casio watch that members of al-Qaeda wore.

Geneva Conventions Did Not Apply

Later in the afternoon of January 11, 2002, Neely was involved in the first violent incident that took place at Guantanamo. It’s an event that he said still haunts him to this day, but it pales in comparison to the brutal torture methods sanctioned by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that would become standard operating procedure at the prison facility later that year.

Neely and another MP were escorting a detainee to his cell. When they arrived, Neely put the detainee, who was still wearing goggles, on his knees and the other MP began to unlock his handcuffs. The detainee, who was in his fifties, flinched. Neely reacted quickly.

“I slammed his face down into the concrete,” Neely said. “He tried to get up and I slammed him down again. I didn’t know what he was trying to do.”

The Immediate Reaction Force Team (IRF), military guards who are trained to use overwhelming force to respond to “disciplinary infractions,” were called in and subdued the detainee. When Neely saw the prisoner again the next day, the side of his face was torn up and scabbed.

Weeks later, Neely learned that the detainee flinched because he thought he was going to be executed when he was told to get down on his knees.

The violence escalated as the weeks passed. There wasn’t a formal standard operating procedure (SOP) that advised guards how to treat detainees, Neely said.

“We were told there was no SOP and the book would be written as we went along,” he said. “If detainees refused medication the IRF team came in and forced them to take medication. I sat there and watched a medic punch a detainee in the face one time as the detainee was chained to the back of his cage in a Jesus Christ pose because the detainee didn’t want to drink his Ensure.”

A day before he left for Guantanamo, Neely said his unit was told “by the company commander, the colonel and platoon sergeant that these people were not Prisoners of War. They were detainees and the Geneva Conventions would not be in effect.”

George W. Bush formally rescinded Geneva Conventions protections for “war on terror” detainees on February 7, 2002. A bipartisan congressional report released three years ago traced the torture of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to that document.

The Pentagon did not respond to Neely’s specific allegations. In the past, Defense Department spokespeople said detainees were treated humanely and all incidents of abuse were investigated.

Neely left Guantanamo in June 2002 with an achievement medal for “exceptional meritorious service” and returned to Fort Hood. By that time, the conversations he had with some of the British detainees about pop culture, such as hip-hop music, led him to doubt the government’s claims that all of the detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo were terrorists.

“I had a feeling I was being lied to,” Neely said. “Some of these guys grew up the same way I did. They listened to the same music. That’s when I started to question it. It was years later when I realized a lot of these guys weren’t guilty of anything at all.”

The government did lie to Neely and did so again in 2003 when he was sent to Iraq to fight a war predicated on ridding the country of its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. He returned to the US a year later and fell into a deep depression, his mind ravaged by post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I returned to a wife and three beautiful children I did not even know and who didn’t even know the man I came home as,” Neely said, who was only 23 years old when his tour of duty in Iraq ended.

Obama Under Pressure

Neely left the military in 2005. He declined a call to return to active duty in 2007 and received an honorable discharge. He became active in the antiwar movement. Part of his healing process involved making a personal apology to two of the British detainees he had stood guard over during the six months he spent at Guantanamo. He found them via Facebook. Although Neely’s in a better place mentally, he said he’s still not whole.

“There has not been a day that goes by that I have not re-lived what I did or saw in Guantanamo,” he said. “Its time for the Government to close Guantánamo and admit to what took place inside the wire then and only then can this country start to head back towards the morals, values, and principals that it once stood and fought for.”

Carrico, the former Guantanamo prison commander, agrees. So do two-dozen retired generals and admirals who sent a letter to President Obama Monday urging him to fulfill a promise he made after he was sworn into office and shut Guantanamo.

“We understand the political opposition you have faced in closing Guantanamo, but you too bear responsibility for failing to do so,” wrote the retired generals and admirals. “Your policy of holding detainees indefinitely, perhaps forever, without charge or trial, not only stands in the way of closing Guantanamo, but is insupportable in a nation of laws…Terrorists aim to sow fear, and thereby to cause us to change who we are…In the war of ideals, we can only lose if we forfeit ours…We know that you have tried over the past three years to fulfill the important promises you made to the American people in your first days in office, but this is a fight that you and our nation cannot afford to lose.”

At a press briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Obama’s commitment to shutting down the detention camp “is as firm today as it was during [Obama's] campaign.”

“We will continue to abide by that commitment and work towards its fulfillment,” Carney said, without elaborating how Obama intended to carry out that promise.

The passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, which Obama signed into law on New Year’s Eve, certainly does not help. The law guarantees Guantanamo will remain open indefinitely as it restricts the transfer of detainees.

Retaliation

Neely, who works in law enforcement in Houston, Texas, said until the prison is closed he will continue to speak critically about the detention facility and talk about the abuses that took place there. He is one of just a a handful of former guards who has come forward over the past decade to talk about Guantanamo.

Truthout has interviewed more than a dozen other former Guantanamo guards over the past year, who have told disturbing stories of abuse they participated in and witnessed, but none will speak on the record because they fear their careers will be ruined or they will be prosecuted by the government for defying a nondisclosure agreement  they signed prior to leaving the detention facility that prohibits them from speaking with the media about Guantanamo. All of the former guards said their service at Guantanamo had traumatized them.

Last year, the US Army told a reservist who spent half his life in the military that he was barred from re-enlisting, asserting he “leaked” classified information to this reporter during an interview in which he spoke candidly about his experiences working as a guard at Guantanamo Bay eight years ago.

For Neely, who also signed a nondisclosure agreement, speaking up has come at a cost.

He said he has been regularly harassed at work, relegated to the night shift and has been accused of being a terrorist sympathizer.

Still, he said he “decided that I needed to tell my story about Guantanamo.”

“How can I as a father tell my children to tell the truth and stand up for what they believe in if I am not willing to do the same?”

(Left to right) Senators Joseph Lieberman, Carl Levin, chair, Senate Armed Services Committee, and John McCain. The controversial provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act were hatched in secret by Levin and McCain. Army photo by D. Myles Cullen

The shameful dinosaurs of the Senate — hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making — approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions — Sections 1031 and 1032, designed to make mandatory the indefinite military detention of terror suspects until the end of hostilities in a “war on terror” that seems to have no end (if they are identified as a member of al-Qaeda or an alleged affiliate, or have planned or carried out an attack on the United States), ending a long and entirely appropriate tradition of trying terror suspects in federal court for their alleged crimes, and Sections 1033 and 1034, which seek to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by imposing onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and banning the use of funds to purchase an alternative prison anywhere else. I have previously remarked on these depressing developments in articles in July and October, as they have had a horribly long period of gestation, in which no one with a grip on reality — and admiration for the law — has been able to wipe them out.

The four sections are connected, as cheerleaders for the mandatory military detention of terror suspects want them to be sent to Guantánamo, and have done, if I recall correctly, at least since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas plane bomber in 2009, was arrested, read his Miranda rights, and interrogated by the FBI. Recently, Abdulmutallab, who told his interrogators all they wanted to know without being held in military custody — and, for that matter, without being tortured, which is what the hardcore cheerleaders for military detention also want — was tried and convicted in a federal court.

Hundreds of other terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court, throughout the Bush years, and under Obama, but supporters of military custody like to forget this, as it conflicts with their notions, held since the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s horrendous flight from the law, that terrorists are warriors. Underpinning it all is the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the founding document of the “war on terror,” passed the week after the 9/11 attacks. This authorizes the President to pursue anyone, anywhere who he thinks was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and it is a dreadfully open-ended excuse for endless war whose repeal I have long encouraged, but which some lawmakers have been itching to renew, even after the death of Osama bin Laden, and the obvious incentives for the winding-down of the ruinous, decade-long “war on terror.”

The fundamental opposition to the provision for the mandatory military custody of terror suspects

Depressingly, when it came to passing the Act, the world was treated to the unedifying spectacle of lawmakers arguing about whether the existing law — the AUMF, plus the Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that it authorizes detention until the end of hostilities — actually applies to Americans, and whether, on that basis, this new legislation does too. Their compromise was that it would authorize whatever already exists, which only made them look rather stupid, frankly. For evidence, check out this comment from Sen. Carl Levin,  as mentioned in the New York Times. “We make clear that whatever the law is, it is unaffected by this language in our bill,” he said.

However, one of the even more extraordinary things about the Senate’s custody provisions is not only that they are a mangled, scrambled mess, but also that no one who will be required to obey them wants anything to do with them. The executive branch, the military, the FBI and the CIA — no one asked for this new policy. As Spencer Ackerman noted for Wired:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists.

Also opposing the bill’s unwanted provisions are Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, Obama Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, 16 former interrogators and counterterrorism professionals, and 26 retired military leaders who, on Tuesday, urged Senators to support an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall, backed by Sen. Jim Webb, to strip all the troublesome provisions from the legislation (and also see Sen, Udall’s eminently sensible Washington Post op-ed). Despite this, the Udall amendment was defeated by 61 votes to 37 (with 16 Democrats voting against the amendment — see the breakdown of votes here).

In addition, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, although whether he will remains to be seen. The mandatory military custody provisions, after all, have a get-out clause, as Andrew Cohen noted for the Atlantic a month ago, when he wrote:

Section 1032, to be applied in concert with Section 1031, contains a mandatory detention requirement for anyone “determined” (by the military) to be a member of al-Qaeda or its affiliates. It allows the executive branch, however, to “waive” this requirement by having the “Secretary of Defense … in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence” submit to Congress a written certificate that the waiver is in the “national security interests of the United States.” The executive branch, in other words, would practically have to do a song-and-dance on Capitol Hill to prosecute a terror suspect in civilian court.

Obama, of course, is no great defender of due process, as he had Osama bin Laden killed in a Wild West style and also approved the execution without any kind of charge or trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in Yemen, where he was producing irritating jihadist material in English on the Internet. However, it seems likely that his defense secretary, Leon Panetta, will indeed be forced to jump through hoops if the custody provisions are not removed.

I honesty find it hard to believe that these proposals even made it as far as they did, especially as Sen. Carl Levin was involved in drafting the legislation with the usual deranged suspects — Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Liebermann — plus torture advocate Sen. Kelly Ayote, who attempted to specifically reintroduce torture as official US policy in her own deranged bill, which was recently defeated. Astonishingly, the Senate Armed Services Committee, where this toxic brew was created, conjured it up in secret, which did not go down well with some of the lawmakers’ colleagues. Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid initially found his spine and spoke up against it, he soon remembered that it is his job to cave in on matters of importance, which he duly did, although others were not so easily swayed.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as Andrew Rosenthal explained in the New York Times, noted with horror that the provisions were “hashed out behind closed doors without consultation with his committee [he is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee], or the Intelligence Committee, or the Defense Department, the FBI or the intelligence community.” In addition, as Andrew Cohen explained:

Leahy, and California’s Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote Sen. Reid a letter requesting that the controversial provisions be removed from the NDAA. “We concur with the Administration’s view that mandatory military custody is ‘undue and dangerous,’” they wrote, “and that these provisions would ‘severely and recklessly undermine’ our Nation’s counterterrorism efforts.”

The provisions relating to Guantánamo and why they are also important

However, while a host of critics are lined up against the mandatory military custody aspects of the bill, far less attention, unfortunately, has been paid to the provisions preventing the closure of Guantánamo. As Andrew Cohen lamented a month ago, “I think Section 1034 [banning the use of any funds to buy an alternative prison] may be the worst of the lot — a triumph of fear and prejudice over pragmatic solutions. But it doesn’t appear to have raised the hackles of even those senators who are opposed to some of the other provisions. Go figure.”

Go figure, indeed. It may, perhaps, be slightly cynical of me to note that the story of Guantánamo involves foreigners and that Americans only wake up in any kind of numbers when legal monstrosities might apply to American citizens, but there does appear to be some truth in it. If it could be demonstrated that no American could possibly end up in mandatory military custody as a result of the Senate’s mad provisions, I would be prepared to wager that hardly any Americans would bat an eyelid.

As it is, I can only hope that the two sections relating to Guantánamo, and two other sections specifically criticized by the President’s advisors (in which Congress demanded detainee reviews from the executive branch) are subjected to a veto. To make it clear, Section 1033 (which ramps up unjustifiable restrictions already implemented by lawmakers) is entitled, “Requirements for certifications relating to the transfer of detainees at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign countries and other foreign entities,” and it stipulates that no transfer out of Guantánamo will be allowed “if there is a confirmed case of any individual who was detained at [Guantánamo] who was transferred to such foreign country or entity and subsequently engaged in any terrorist activity.”

As noted above, Section 1034 (which repeats previous bans imposed by lawmakers) is entitled, “Prohibition on use of funds to construct or modify facilities in the United States to house detainees transferred from United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” prevents the closure of Guantánamo by stopping the President from buying or modifying an alternative facility elsewhere, and then there are the two other provisions, both new, and both largely unnoticed.

Section 1035, entitled, “Procedures for periodic detention review of individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” requires the Secretary of Defense “to submit a report to Congress for implementing the periodic review process” established in the executive order of March this year, which, outrageously, authorized the indefinite detention without charge or trial — but with periodic reviews — of 46 of the remaining 171 prisoners, on the unacceptable basis that they were too dangerous to be released, but that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial.

Section 1036, entitled, “Procedures for Status Determinations,” states that, “Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report setting forth the procedures for determining the status of persons detained pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40) for purposes of section 1031″ — meaning that it is supposed to establish, to the satisfaction of Congress, who will be subjected to mandatory military custody.

The response of the President’s Office, in its letter threatening a veto, spells out the administration’s opposition to these sections, and is of interest. The President’s advisors noted:

The certification and waiver, required by section 1033 before a detainee may be transferred from Guantánamo Bay to a foreign country, continue to hinder the Executive branch’s ability to exercise its military, national security, and foreign relations activities. While these provisions may be intended to be somewhat less restrictive than the analogous provisions in current law, they continue to pose unnecessary obstacles, effectively blocking transfers that would advance our national security interests, and would, in certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The Executive branch must have the flexibility to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers.

Section 1034′s ban on the use of funds to construct or modify a detention facility in the United States is an unwise intrusion on the military’s ability to transfer its detainees as operational needs dictate.

Section 1035 conflicts with the consensus-based interagency approach to detainee reviews required under Executive Order No. 13567, which establishes procedures to ensure that periodic review decisions are informed by the most comprehensive information and the considered views of all relevant agencies.

Section 1036, in addition to imposing onerous requirements, conflicts with procedures for detainee reviews in the field that have been developed based on many years of experience by military officers and the Department of Defense.

The President’s advisors concluded:

In short, the matters addressed in these provisions are already well regulated by existing procedures and have traditionally been left to the discretion of the Executive branch.

Broadly speaking, the detention provisions in this bill micromanage the work of our experienced counterterrorism professionals, including our military commanders, intelligence professionals, seasoned counterterrorism prosecutors, or other operatives in the field. These professionals have successfully led a Government-wide effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents over two consecutive Administrations. The Administration believes strongly that it would be a mistake for Congress to overrule or limit the tactical flexibility of our Nation’s counterterrorism professionals.

This is not quite the end of the road for the NDAA, as it must now be consolidated with the version previously passed by the House of Representatives, which I wrote about here and here. However, it is almost certain that the President will soon be required to make clear what he thinks.

If Obama is wavering, as is his habit, I would suggest that he takes note of the fact that the election season is nearly upon us, and that, as we approach that frenzy of hype and hyperbole, he needs do something to make his progressive supporters remember why they might want to vote for him, rather than just hoping — or presuming — that they will not vote against him. In short, the President needs to veto this bill, and stand up for US justice, and the still-pressing need to close Guantánamo, rather than doing as he has so often on national security issues, and caving in to pressure.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

President Barack Obama confers with U.S.Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the NATO summit in Strasbourg, France. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to Clinton's right while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen is between Brown and Clinton. White House photo by Pete Souza

U.S. President Barack Obama will be a lame duck next year and the officials in his administration, especially his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are hilariously doing their best to make sure that they haven’t spared any effort to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries and sabotage the stability and security of those whom they call “enemies”, like Iran.

On October 27, Hillary Clinton gave an exclusive interview to the UK’s state-funded, state-run BBC Persian TV and in an attempt aimed at reaching out to the Iranian nation, made bombastic remarks which have certainly infuriated the Iranian nation and demonstrated that the hostile behavior and antagonistic stance of the U.S. government toward the Iranian nation is a manifestation of the idiom “the leopard can’t change its spots.”

At the beginning of the interview, Clinton referred to the sanctions imposed against Iran by the U.S. and its European allies and said that these sanctions are targeted at forcing the Iranian government into abandoning its nuclear program which she called is an effort to construct nuclear weapons and not for civilian purposes. Forgetting the detrimental impacts of economic sanctions against the ordinary people, Clinton talked of the United States as a friend of the Iranian people, and said that she wanted to reaffirm her country’s “very strong support for and friendship toward the people of Iran.” She further added that the behavior of the United States towards the Iranian government is different from its behavior toward the Iranian people, and by saying that, she clearly paraded her diplomatic naiveté and artlessness. How do you justify enmity with a government which is democratically elected by a group of people which you claim of being supportive of?

Secondly, maybe Mrs. Secretary has forgotten that the U.S. itself is the largest possessor of nuclear weapons in the world. How can such a police state which has so far killed millions of people around the world, from Nagasaki and Hiroshima to Baghdad and Kabul, boast of its concerns about the development of nuclear bombs by a country which is the most pacifist country in a boiling and tumultuous region such as Middle East and hasn’t ever invaded nor attacked any country in the past century?

A Reuters report quoting U.S. officials revealed in May 2010 that the U.S. has an arsenal of 5,113 nuclear warheads. It is the only country which has used nuclear weapons in the warfare and the only nation that has conducted around 1,054 nuclear tests and developed many long-range weapon delivery systems. So, who is really entitled to be concerned? Shouldn’t the international community be anxious about the nuclear arsenal of the self-proclaimed superpower, the U.S.? Who may guarantee that the U.S. won’t use its nuclear weapons in the prospective wars which it will be waging in the future? If the criterion of imposing financial sanctions is the possession of nuclear weapons and pursuing the development of them, why shouldn’t the U.S. or its Middle East client state, Israel, which is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, be the target of sanctions? A report by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis showed that between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. spent at least $8.15 trillion in present day terms on nuclear weapons development. Which country can be pinpointed on the world map which has invested in nuclear program, even for peaceful purposes, so enormously?

But it was not only Clinton’s deceptive bluffs on Iran’s nuclear program that seemed perplexing and ridiculous. She lived beyond her means by claiming that the international community is angry at what Iran is today and wants a better future for its people!

“But I would ask you to put yourself in the position of the international community and those who seek a better future inside Iran. If you do not want to have a conflict, if you do not want to just give way to behavior that is very reckless, as we saw in this recent plot against the Saudi ambassador, potentially dangerous, sanctions is the tool that we have at our disposal to use,” she said.

Clinton went on to raise the issue of the alleged terror plot against the Saudi ambassador in Washington and attributed this plot to Iran. She, however, certainly remembers that they were the agents of CIA, MI6 and Mossad in Iran that assassinated four Iranian nuclear scientists immediately after their name was put on the UNSC sanctions list. Wasn’t the assassination of Dariush Rezaei, Massoud Alimohammadi or the foiled assassination plot against Fereydoon Abbasi a conspicuous sponsorship of terrorism by a government which calls itself the number one defender of democracy and peace? Wasn’t awarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the President of such a country which murders and kills people with impunity some kind of degrading and humiliating this prestigious award?

But an interesting juncture in Clinton’s interview with BBC was where a recorded video containing a question by one of the viewers of BBC was aired. The viewer asked Hillary Clinton about America’s perpetual adherence to double standards, its support for repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, its backing of the dreadful coup d’etat against the democratic government of Iran’s then Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and its heinous shooting down of the Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988 which claimed the lives of 290 innocent passengers including 254 Iranians. Clinton was apparently taken aback by the question as her awkward response showed that the U.S. government has never found any way to account for its hypocritical policies and actions: “we have consistently spoken out about Bahrain and we have pushed the government to do more, and we support the independent investigation… We know that everything we have done in the course of our 235-plus year history is going to appeal to or be supported by everyone, and we take our history seriously. So, for example, we’ve expressed regret about what was done in 1953… And then we also have tried to point out that the tragedy of the shooting down of the airline is something that we deeply are sorry for, and we have said that repeatedly.”

Isn’t it ludicrous? Shooting down a civilian aircraft, killing all the 290 people aboard and then simply saying that we are sorry? Overthrowing a democratic government which reflected the communal will of a nation and then simply saying that we are sorry? Waging wars and imposing sanctions which hurt the daily life of the ordinary people and saying that we are sorry?

Of course Hilary Clinton’s interview with BBC Persian was a fiasco and a political debacle. She just showed her lack of political finesse and once again brought to mind that the wolf may lose his teeth, but never his nature. Clinton is the representative of a country which throughout the history has repeatedly betrayed the Iranian nation. Perhaps expressing deepest apologies to the Iranian nation and changing their hostile attitude can be the first step which the American politicians should take in order to have the bitter memories of their mischievousness wiped off the minds of Iranian people.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer and a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Col. Morris Davis/Photo/Wikimedia

This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.

JTF Guantanamo photo by Army Sgt. Joseph Scozzari

Many Americans probably think that the “War on Terror” began on September 11, 2001, when the terrible terrorist attacks took place, whose 10th anniversary has recently been marked. However, the “War on Terror” actually began on September 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

This open-ended document is the bedrock of the occupation of Afghanistan, which began on October 6, 2001, and of the detention of prisoners in Guantánamo, as the Supreme Court confirmed in June 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, when the Court also confirmed that the AUMF authorizes the detention of those held as a result of the President’s activities.

It has also been “cited as an authority for him to engage in electronic surveillance against possible terrorists without obtaining authorization of the special Court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978,” as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a report on the AUMF in 2007.

This fascinating report (PDF) also reveals that the AUMF could have been far worse, in the sense of allowing the President powers to behave as he saw fit, without the possibility that Congress could constrain him. On September 12, 2001, the White House gave a draft joint resolution to the leaders of the Senate and the House, and, as the report states, “This White House draft legislation, if it had been enacted, would have authorized the President (1) to take military action against those involved in some notable way with the September 11 attacks on the US, but it also would have granted him (2) statutory authority ‘to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.’”

Noting the gravity of the Bush administration’s intentions, the CRS explained:

This language would have seemingly authorized the President, without durational limitation, and at his sole discretion, to take military action against any nation, terrorist group or individuals in the world without having to seek further authority from the Congress. It would have granted the President open-ended authority to act against all terrorism and terrorists or potential aggressors against the United States anywhere, not just the authority to act against the terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and those nations, organizations and persons who had aided or harbored the terrorists.

As a result, the section which would have allowed the President “to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States” was “strongly opposed by key legislators in Congress and was not included in the final version of the legislation that was passed.”

This was significant, and the scale of the President’s ambitions were glimpsed when, after the death of Osama bin Laden in May, some Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Buck McKeon (R – Calif.), wanted to revive the AUMF with a much broader scope (in line with the Bush administration’s original plans), rather than accepting that, with the death of al-Qaeda’s leader, the AUMF was no longer needed. The difference was that Rep. McKeon envisaged Congress in the driving seat, but it was still alarming that he was calling for what Spencer Ackerman of Wired described as “a big expansion of executive authority.”

I discussed the outrageous position taken by these lawmakers in an article at the time, entitled, “No End to the ‘War on Terror,’ No End to Guantánamo,” in which I also discussed the need for the AUMF to be scrapped as a justification for holding prisoners at Guantánamo neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects.

This has been a long and lonely campaign on my part, as it is outrageous that, ten years after the 9/11 attacks, the legacy of the Bush administration’s reckless decision to declare a war instead of a crime on September 11, 2001, and to insist that it was appropriate to hold soldiers and terror suspects as “illegal enemy combatants” without rights, still exists at Guantánamo.

When President Obama found it difficult to close the prison, he was, at least, reassured that there was nothing illegal about continuing to hold prisoners at Guantánamo, because of the AUMF, and so, ten years after 9/11, it continues to be regarded as acceptable that the soldiers held in Guantánamo are not allowed to ask when the “war” in which they were seized will come to an end, and that the actual terror suspects — a few dozen men, including those accused of masterminding and being involved in the 9/11 attacks — are supposed to be subjected to trials by military commission, while every terror suspect not held at Guantánamo is tried in federal court.

In the Nation this week, John Nichols was the only mainstream journalist to take an interest in the 10th anniversary of the AUMF. He wrote that, on the eve of the 9/11 attacks, he was at a conference in Brussels, “Journalism in the Shadow of Terror Laws,” with Mary Robinson, the former Irish president and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose words struck a chord with Nichols.

“I remember,” she said, “the loneliness of speaking out against the declaration of a ‘war on terrorism.’” She added, as Nichols described it, that:

The language we use to characterize events defines our response to them and when crimes against humanity were defined as acts of war, then an appropriate demand that those responsible for horrific violence be brought to justice was replaced with the overwrought and overarching demands of “a perpetual war of terror.”

Homing in on the Congressional approval of the AUMF on September 14, 2001, Nichols noted that this “perpetual war” has not only had a massive human cost, but has also been a political disaster, losing “both good will and authority over the past decade,” and has also involved a staggering financial cost — more than $7.6 trillion in defense and homeland security spending, according to “new accounting by the National Priorities Project.”

Nichols understands that America’s military-industrial complex would have found ways to try and bankrupt America without the “War on Terror,” although he is correct to explain that this “permanent war” has redefined America just as James Madison worried when he wrote in 1795, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” and when, in particular, he wrote, “No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

In the US, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only lawmaker to speak out against he AUMF back in September 2001, when she warned, “[We] must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.”

Barbara Lee was threatened and ridiculed for being the sole lawmaker to vote against the AUMF, but she has now submitted legislation calling for the AUMF to be repealed. “In reflecting on the rush-to-war in Afghanistan and President Bush’s misguided war-of-choice in Iraq,” she said, “my worst fears have unfortunately been realized.” She added:

Over the past [decade], this broad authorization of force has had far-reaching implications which shake the very foundations of our great nation and democracy. It has been used to justify warrantless surveillance and wiretapping activities, indefinite detention practices that fly in the face of our constitutional values, extrajudicial targeted-killing operations, and a policy of borderless and open-ended war that threatens to indefinitely extend US military engagement around the world.

Lee concluded, “It is time for Congress to reexamine, and ultimately repeal this flawed authorization. The alternative, to concede Congress’s constitutional responsibilities and blindly accept the persistence of war without end, is unacceptable.”

It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will pick up on Barbara Lee’s proposal, or whether they will continue to allow themselves to be distracted by the self-serving lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney. This time around, as John Nichols explained, she has the support of 14 co-sponsors for her bill — 13 Democrats and one Republican.

This is an improvement, but much more interest is needed, if this dreadful legislation — the justification for “perpetual war,” indefinite detentions at Guantánamo, and the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens — is to be repealed, bringing the brutal and lamentable “War on Terror” to an end.

Note: Also see David Swanson’s article here.

Originally published on the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

As a result, Cheney knew that, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched the “war on terror” that he is still so concerned to defend, his voice would be echoing in the ears of millions of his countrymen and women, helping to disguise a bitter truth: that, following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was largely responsible for the abomination that is Guantánamo, and for the torture to which prisoners were subjected from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantánamo and the “black sites” that littered the world.

Alarmingly, while Cheney has been largely successful in claiming that the use of torture was helpful, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case, what strikes me as even more alarming is that many Americans are still unaware of the extent to which the torture for which Cheney was such a cheerleader did not keep them safe from terrorist attacks, but actually provided a lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

As a long time believer in unfettered executive power, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, along with those of his legal counsel, David Addington. The two men had met while defending Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, on the basis that the President should be beyond criticism, and it was Cheney and Addington who were behind a military order issued by George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, which established the President’s right to hold those he regarded as terrorists as a new type of prisoner (who later became the infamous “enemy combatants”), and, if he wished, to prosecute them in trials by military commission, which were designed to secure easy convictions and to use evidence derived through the use of torture.

It was Addington, no doubt after consultation with Cheney, who wrote the memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, which claimed that the Geneva Conventions contained “quaint” provisions, and that the circumstances in which the “war on terror” was being waged rendered “obsolete” the Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo advised the President to discard the Geneva Conventions for the prisoners at Guantánamo, which had opened two weeks earlier.

The purpose was to allow coercive interrogations, and even the use of torture, and this became official policy on August 1, 2002, when another of Cheney’s colleagues, John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice, wrote two memos known as the “torture memos,” which attempted to redefine torture — including the use of waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning — so that it could be used by the CIA.

With the help of another of Cheney’s circle of close colleagues — Jim Haynes, the Pentagon’s General Counsel — the torture techniques chosen were reverse-engineered from those taught in US military schools to help US military personnel resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy. Haynes had made the first approach to the organization responsible for the program, known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), and he also played a role in the spread of torture techniques to Guantánamo, as approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in November 2002, which then spread to Iraq, leading to the horrors that were revealed around the world when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

Even so, Cheney’s biggest crime, to my mind, remains the way in which, while pretending to use torture to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks, he actually used it to attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This bleak story involves Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan — Khalden — that was shut down by the Taliban in 2000 after he refused to allow Osama bin Laden to take it over.  Al-Libi was initially interrogated by the FBI, but they were brushed aside by the CIA, who flew al-Libi to Egypt, where the torturers of Hosni Mubarak’s savage regime secured a patently false confession that Saddam Hussein had met with two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi recanted the false confession obtained through torture — which apparently included waterboarding — in 2004, although the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded at the time of the confession, in February 2002, that al-Libi had misled his torturers. However, no one told Colin Powell, who used it in the presentation he made to the UN Security Council in February 2003, a month before the invasion. This is alarming enough, but as it is clear that Dick Cheney knew about the DIA’s analysis that al-Libi had lied, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that, while pretending to protect the American people, Cheney was actually responsible for using a lie obtained through torture to justify an illegal war that would lead to the deaths of thousands of US military personnel, and of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Torture is a crime, for which Dick Cheney should pay, on the 10th anniversary of the 9//11 attacks, rather than being feted as some sort of entertainingly opinionated elder statesman. Above all, however, the al-Libi episode reveals the former Vice President not only as a torturer, but also as some sort of a traitor, making his continued ability to walk free, and to continue spreading his self-serving lies, a damning state of affairs for America as a whole, and one that should make decent Americans recoil in shame and horror from what they and their country have become.

Note: For more on the bleak story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, see Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. For more on the malignant influence of Dick Cheney, see Dick Cheney: invisible tyrant, Dick Cheney: more horrors from the ‘Vice-President for Torture’, The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers and Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low.

Originally published on the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Cheney has been unshakable in defense of his decision to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read torture) including waterboarding. “I would strongly support using it again if we had a high value detainee and that was the only way we could get him to talk,’’ he said.

But Human Rights First (HRF), one of the advocacy groups weighing in against the book, said, “The former Vice President has long claimed that abusive interrogation methods yielded information that ultimately saved lives, but national security experts and retired military leaders – including Senator John McCain, CIA Director General David Patraeus and former Marine Corps Commandant General Charles Krulak (Ret.) – disagree.”

Numerous official and private investigations and congressional testimony by an FBI interrogator strongly suggest that conventional interrogation techniques yield far more reliable results.

In conjunction with the release of Cheney’s memoir, HRF is launching an online ad campaign featuring prominent voices denouncing torture and highlighting the detrimental effect it has had on the United States’ anti-terrorism efforts. The ad links to an original 30 second video and will be seen on Google and YouTube, as well as in messages sent by the New York Times’ “Today’s Headlines” and Politico’s “The Huddle.”

“Former Vice President Cheney can write and say whatever he wants, but torture is torture and there’s no disputing the harm its use brought the United States,” said Human Rights First’s Elisa Massimino. “Torture eroded the nation’s standing as an international leader in human rights. It undermined our ability to gather reliable intelligence, and it has no place in U.S. national security policy. Two days after he took office, President Obama closed the book on torture and it needs to stay shut.”

Other like organizations expressed similar disapproval of the new memoir, which was released this week.

Amnesty USA said “The failure to hold the architects of policies of torture and disappearance during the ‘global war on terror’ to account remains an enduring stain on the global reputation of the United States. Those most responsible for the shameful abuses at Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and other black sites around the world continue to boast of their ‘accomplishments’ with complete impunity.”

Since leaving office, AI said, “Cheney has been without question the most prominent apologist for the regime of indefinite detention and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ instituted by the Bush administration.

AI has revisited some of the former Vice President’s previous statements to “demonstrate how they contrast not only with the reality of the situation, but also with the United States’ obligations.” For example:

Speaking on September 16, 2001, on NBC’s Meet the Press Cheney “set the tone for the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks. He said ‘We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world… it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective’.”

AI counters with: “As a party to of a wide range of international human rights and international humanitarian law instruments, including the U.N. Convention against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, the United States is simply not free to use ‘any means’ at its disposal – it is constrained by the applicable international law to operate within lawful parameters.”

In an interview with CNN on June 24, 2005, AI says Cheney “spun a rosy picture of conditions in Guantanamo.” ‘We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want’.”

The reality, says AI, is that “since January 2002, eight inmates have died while in custody at the U.S.-controlled detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Six of these deaths have been declared suicides. Hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay are known to have engaged in hunger strikes at the prison in protest of conditions and their prolonged confinement without trial.”

AI reminds us that Cheney said in 2005 of the 520 detainees then held at Guantánamo: “Hard-core terrorists is the only way to describe them. They’re unlawful combatants. They’re out to kill Americans. And if you put them back on the streets, that’s exactly what they’ll do… [W]e absolutely need to have a facility like that to house some very violent and evil people.”

It also reminds us that, by the end of President Bush’s second term, his administration had released 525 former Guantanamo detainees without charge. A January 2011 study of some 600 former Guantanamo inmates conducted by the New America Foundation put the recidivism figure at six percent.

Former Vice President Cheney has consistently maintained that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” prevented terrorist attacks and claimed that the release of classified memos would support his claim. In a speech delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in May 2009 Cheney stated: “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed…The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

Amnesty contends that “there is no evidence that hundreds of thousands of lives were saved as a result of the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. In August 2009 a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Amnesty International and coalition partners resulted in the release of the two CIA memos that the former Vice President had claimed would vindicate his public statements. In fact, the memos confirmed that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information obtained.”

The organization charges that “Information obtained through coercion led directly to one of the greatest intelligence failures of the past decade – the assessment that Iraq posed an imminent security threat to the United States. Suspected Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured. To make his interrogators stop, he told them that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This intelligence was used in part to justify the Iraq War. No such link existed.”

In an October 2006 interview, former Vice President Cheney told radio host Scott Hennen that authorizing waterboarding was “a no-brainer” and denied that it amounted to torture. Similarly, in a February 2008 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Cheney told his audience: “The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not torture – it’s against our laws and against our values.”

Amnesty responds: “Torture is indeed against the law, and water boarding – or simulated drowning – has consistently been considered to be torture under both international and U.S. jurisprudence. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Japanese officials were convicted of torturing captured U.S. pilots by subjecting them to waterboarding. In 1983, Texas sheriff James Parker and his deputies water-boarded a number of prisoners in an effort to elicit confessions. Parker was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for his actions and the judge presiding over the case repeatedly described waterboarding unambiguously as torture in his judgment.”

Amnesty adds, “In April 2009, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee issued the conclusions of its ‘Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody’. Among its findings is that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

The organization makes similar claims regarding the issue of trials before military commissions v. trials in the civilian justice system. Cheney has repeatedly asserted that military commissions are the most appropriate venue for alleged terrorist trials. But Amnesty points out that Federal courts successfully prosecuted 523 terrorism-related defendants between September 11th, 2001, and December 31st, 2009. Approximately 235 defendants are still on trial. About 70 have been acquitted or had charges dismissed. The present conviction rate is 88 percent.

Military commissions have only convicted six people to date, which represents less than one percent of the inmates who have passed through GTMO.

Tom Parker, AI’s policy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, said in advance of the release of Cheney’s memoir: “One can only hope that former Vice President Cheney’s memoir will not serve as yet another vehicle through which to peddle the same discredited mix of half-baked assertions and dark threats that marked his time in office. These have been comprehensively debunked by every new piece of information that emerges about the Bush administration’s failed counterterrorism policies.

Amnesty is also reiterating its call to US citizens to urge US Attorney General Eric Holder to “immediately open a criminal investigation into the role former President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and other officials played in the use of torture on detainees held in U.S. government custody.”

A large number of human rights and justice organizations have taken similar positions. These include the Center for Constitutional Rights, the public service law firm that has provided many of the pro bono lawyers who volunteered to defend GTMO inmates. Cheney’s daughter Liz, a former Assistant Secretary of State, has attacked the loyalty of the volunteer lawyers.

Chip Pitts, former president of Amnesty USA, perhaps summed up the deeply held feelings of Cheney’s opponents. He told The Public Record, “By debasing the United States and its commitment to the rule of law, encouraging unjustified yet devastatingly expensive and corrupt foreign wars, and even attempting to re-legitimate torture in a way not seen since the Middle Ages, Dick Cheney has likely done more damage than any other Bush administration official – or indeed anyone else in US history — to our nation’s authentic security and future prospects.

“His continued obliviousness to the catastrophic consequences and severe harm he has caused to so many people evinces, at a minimum, an obstinate and pathological inhumanity. This memoir will no doubt serve to further incriminate him rather than exonerate him.”

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

Nydia Velázquez and other Members of the Hispanic Caucus. Photo/Wikimedia

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is charging that the President’s Secure Communities (S-Comm) policy “is not living up to its name,” and is demanding that the Obama Administration declare a moratorium on the program’s implementation.

The Caucus said it has sent a letter to President Obama “following a chorus of growing criticism of program.” The letter states, “Evidence reveals not only a striking dissonance between the program’s stated purpose of removing dangerous criminals and it’s actual effect; it also suggests that S-Comm may endanger the public, particularly among communities of color….”

The Caucus said, “Secure Communities (SCOMM) was initially described as a program to identify and deport immigrants found guilty of serious crimes.  The program enlists local police into federal immigration enforcement by screening all fingerprints of those booked in local jails through the federal ICE database.”

They added, “Data revealed through a federal lawsuit filed by civil rights groups shows the program fails to live up to its stated intention, as the program deports large groups of people without any convictions or convicted of only minor offenses.”

According to the CHC, “Lawmakers in Congress and in states throughout the country say ICE officials lied about program details and requirements at its early stages.”

Other groups are expressing similar sentiments. For example, the Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) applauded Illinois Governor Quinn for “his decision to terminate our state’s participation in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Secure Communities program.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, has described the implementation of the program as “dissembling and deceiving” and has called for an Inspector General (IG) investigation with the support of Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey.

The call is reminiscent of another IG report on SCOMM’s predecessor, the 287(g) program, made famous by Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, which showed “a program riddled with flaws that was too broken to be fixed.”

On May 4th, the Governor of Illinois terminated his state’s participation in the program.  In California, Assemblyman Ammiano introduced the TRUST Act to reform and regulate the program. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, large-scale rallies have taken place in opposition to the program.

Thus the Caucus states, “We appreciate and steadfastly support your efforts to reform broken immigration laws and to strengthen national security and public safety.  Unfortunately, neither of these goals are served or advanced by the S-Comm policy in its current form”

The group added, “We are not convinced the program is achieving its stated goals, and we see nothing in the management and oversight of S-Comm that convinces us that these risks have been adequately addressed in the latest incarnation of local police immigration enforcement….For these reasons, we request an immediate freeze of S-Comm pending a thorough review.”

Pablo Alvarado, Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network whose organization along with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, are litigants in a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). These groups said in a statement:

“SCOMM has become a symbol of the President’s broken promises on immigration reform. We are all painfully aware of the poisonous political climate on immigration reform, but there is simply no excuse for the President to deploy a policy that criminalizes immigrants, erodes our civil rights, and destroys community safety. The policy is unacceptable and it needs to be stopped immediately.”

They added, “There is a domestic human rights crisis in Arizona and elsewhere, on display to the world, because of the foolish entanglement of police in immigration enforcement. To allow — and advance — a policy that repeats Arizona’s mistakes across the whole country would be a betrayal.”

The President must change direction immediately, through actions and not mere words.  His first steps on the road to reform can- and must- be heeding the Hispanic Caucus’ call and putting S-Comm on ice.

“Obama should re-think the Secure Communities program,” said Sunita Patel, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney. “Rather than force states and local jurisdictions to become entangled with immigration enforcement, he should pause and prevent the program’s operation. Governor Patrick Quinn and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have it right. A moratorium is needed now.”

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

It claims that only 26.3 perent goes to “National Defense”. This is similar to the claim in the 1040EZ US income tax form booklet (see pages 36-37). Here are those two pages in a PDF. There the claim is that the U.S. government only spends 22 percent of its money on “National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs.” The form admits that you could leave out the “foreign affairs” part and still be at 21 percent.

The White House website claims to calculate both veterans’ expenses and foreign affairs separately and still put “defense” alone at 26.3 percent.

However, take a look now at the pie chart created by the War Resisters League, which shows 51 percent of the budget going to the military.

Twenty-one percent and 26.3 percent and 51 percent aren’t even close to each other.  This is not “good enough for government work.”  This is our money.  What gives?

Well, the White House website and the income tax form play a number of dirty tricks on us.  The income tax form lumps Social Security and Medicare into the budget even though they are not funded with income taxes and are not discretionary spending.  Take that money out, and the 1040EZ now tells us that the military makes up 32 percent of national public spending.  But the White House website claims to be dealing just with income tax when it puts military spending at a mere 26.3 percent.

The tax form says it’s using FY2009 numbers, while the White House says it’s dealing with FY 2010, as does the pie chart.  But the numbers haven’t changed THAT much.  The tax form and the pie chart are including veterans costs.  Adding those in on the White House website gets us to 30.4 percent.  That’s a little bit more honest a number, but still a long ways from 51 percent.

To review, the 2009 tax form puts military and veterans spending at 32 percent, the 2010 White House website at 30.4 percent, and the 2010 War Resisters chart at 51 percent.  Something still needs to be explained.

Part of the explanation is surely that a chunk of federal spending is payment of interest on debt, and most of that debt (80 percent according to the War Resisters League) is for past military expenses.  Both the tax form and the White House website lump all debt together as something separate from the military.  Applying the WRL calculation to the numbers on the White House website would bring its actual total military spending to 36.3 percent.  That’s a good bit more than the 26.3 percent any casual reader of the White House website will come away thinking goes to the military.  But it remains far short of 51 percent.

I can’t tell from the posted explanations, but very likely a couple of things are happening.  First, we spend a great deal on military operations through departments other than the “Department of Defense.”  The State Department hires mercenaries.  The Energy Department builds nukes.  There’s a whole new department called “Homeland Security.”  The CIA apparently has enough cash sloshing around that the President can secretly authorize it to arm a force in Libya sufficiently to take on another force we helped arm in Libya.  The bulk of our “foreign aid” consists of giving weapons (or cash with which to buy U.S. weapons) to countries we may one day fight wars against.  The War Resisters League seems to be trying to calculate all of these things.  The White House probably isn’t.

Second, even though the year 2010 has already happened, when its budget was originally laid out, it didn’t include a “supplemental” (off the books) spending bill for wars.  This is a nifty little gimmick the Obamabots inherited from the Bushies after having campaigned against it.  I would be less than shocked if the supplemental was still being left out of the White House numbers as if it had never happened.

In addition, there is a fundamental problem of honesty on the White House website and in the income tax booklet.  Both refer to the military as “defense,” while most of the expense has absolutely nothing to do with defense.  We build weapons for which no enemy exists.  We build bases halfway around the globe.  And the Justice Department justifies wars, such as the latest one in Libya, without even trying to claim there is anything defensive about it.

We are not spending 26 percent on defense.  We are spending 51 percent on the military.

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie.”

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: sunilgarg, kzappaster, ~Brenda-Starr~)

Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national security issues, and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the US mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently important to the administration that officials won’t jettison them the moment that critics start howling.

After this first success with the cleared prisoners — blocking entry to the US for the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, who had been cleared for release by a US court — Republicans, and, to a lesser extent, dissenters within Obama’s own party, realized that the power to shape national security issues was in their hands, particularly when the magic word “Guantánamo” was invoked.

As a result, when a young Nigerian, apparently recruited in Yemen, tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and the critics howled that no Yemenis in Guantánamo should be released, the President didn’t point out that this was unacceptable, and was, moreover, a call for him to endorse a policy of “guilt by nationality.” Instead, he immediately capitulated, imposing a moratorium on the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo that still stands 15 months later, and that, single-handedly, undermined the President’s own promise to close the prison.

A similar success for Obama’s critics took place after Attorney General Eric Holder announced on November 13, 2009 that

This image of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was taken in July 2009 under an agreement with Guantanamo prison camp staff that lets Red Cross delegates photograph detainees and send photos to family members.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would face a federal court trial in New York, on the same day that he announced that five other men would face trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo.

Although this announcement went down well initially, with most of the complaints coming from critics of the Commissions —myself included — who were dismayed that Obama and Holder had brought the much-criticized military trial system back from the dead, a cynical backlash soon started against the proposed federal court trial for the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. This was orchestrated by Keep America Safe, an organization founded by 9/11 widow Debra Burlingame, rightwing pundit William

Krystol, and Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, which might, more appropriately, have been called

“Keep America Afraid.” However, it succeeded in its mission, because, predictably by now, when the critics’ complaints were loud enough, Obama again backed down, effectively shelving the plans, and leaving Holder looking foolish.

Nevertheless, the Attorney General at least maintained some principles. Aware of the significance of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators, Holder told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last February that he was “determined not to capitulate on the idea of holding a 9/11 trial.” Mayer’s report continued:

“I don’t apologize for what I’ve done,” he told me at one point. “History will show that the decisions we’ve made

are the right ones.” Holder said that he regarded trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a courtroom as “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.” But, he added, “between now and then I suspect we’re in for some interesting times.”

Those “interesting times” have seen Holder’s boss make no effort to fight back against his critics, so that, by the end of last year

, supporters of Guantánamo in Congress were so emboldened, and so certain that Obama would do nothing to oppose them, that

they inserted provisions into an important military spending bill explicitly prohibiting the administration from bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland to face a trial — specifically mentioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by name, in case anyone missed the point.

When the bill was passed, Obama could have vetoed it and fought to remove the offending provision, or he could, more contentiously, have issued a signing statement refusing to accept it, but predictably he did neither, meaning that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused would either remain in Guantánamo without facing a trial at all, or that the President would

accept that he had been bullied into putting them forward for trial by Military Commission.

Announcing the bullying option on Monday, Eric Holder did not even bother to disguise his disappointment. He began by

explaining that, when he had examined the best option for the trial in 2009, he had done so with an open mind, and had concluded that “the best venue for prosecution was in federal court.” He added, pointedly, “I stand by that decision today,” and then provided a compelling defense of the federal court decision:

[W]e were prepared to bring a powerful case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators — one of the most well-researched and documented cases I have ever seen in my decades of experience as a prosecutor. We had carefully evaluated the evidence and concluded that we could prove the defendants’ guilt while adhering to the bedrock traditions and values of our laws. We had consulted extensively with the intelligence community and developed detailed plans for handling classified evidence. Had this case proceeded in Manhattan or in an alternative venue in the United States, as I seriously explored in the past year, I am confident that our justice system would have performed with the same distinction that has been its hallmark for over two hundred years.

Holder then proceeded to condemn Congress for interfering in the decision for political reasons, generously citing the President’s complaint that these “unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counterterrorism efforts and could harm our national security,” but primarily expressing his own dismay far more eloquently, and inadvertently revealing how, in contrast, nothing that relates to Guantánamo is of particular importance to Obama, who has not spoken with conviction on the topic since becoming President:

Decisions about who, where and how to prosecute have always been — and must remain — the responsibility of the executive branch. Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence and other information necessary to make prosecution judgments. Yet they have taken one of the nation’s most tested counterterrorism tools off the table and tied our hands in a way that could have serious ramifications.

Although Holder proceeded to express faith in the Commissions as a system capable of delivering justice, his preference for federal courts was apparent, as he launched into a passionate defense of federal court trials, which was prompted by “a number of unfair, and often unfounded, criticisms.” This was probably a reference to the way in which Republican critics tried to make political capital out of the federal court trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the only Guantánamo prisoner brought to the US mainland (in May 2009), whose recent conviction and life sentence was portrayed by critics as a failure, because the judge barred the use of evidence derived through the use of torture (as he is required to do by law), and because the jury threw out all but one of the 285 counts against Ghailani.

In his defense of the federal court system, Holder wrote:

[F]ederal courts have proven to be an unparalleled instrument for bringing terrorists to justice. Our courts have convicted hundreds of terrorists since September 11, and our prisons safely and securely hold hundreds today, many of them serving long sentences. There is no other tool that has demonstrated the ability to both incapacitate terrorists and collect intelligence from them over such a diverse range of circumstances as our traditional justice system.

In conclusion, Holder lamented that the 9/11 case “has been marked by needless controversy since the beginning.” As he proceeded to explain, “the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators should never have been about settling ideological arguments or scoring political points,” but should “always [have] been about delivering justice for [the] victims of [9/11], and for their surviving loved ones. Nothing else.”

This is another poor day for justice, in an administration that has been marked by an absence of good news when it comes to dealing appropriately with national security issues. Eric Holder deserves only faint praise overall, because of the way in which he was evidently involved in sheltering Bush administration lawyers from prosecution for their involvement in the “torture memos” of August 2002, and for his failure to oversee the Guantánamo habeas legislation, which has proceeded as aggressively as if Bush was still in power. On the 9/11 trial, however, and through his obvious exasperation with a political climate in which terrorism — when related to Guantánamo — is shamelessly played by political opportunists or seized upon by rightwing ideologues who have whipped themselves up into an unseemly frenzy of hysteria and paranoia, Holder at least continues to express a belief in certain principles, however rmuch he has been obliged to ignore them.

Elsewhere in the administration, and particularly in the actions of Barack Obama, who has consistently failed to provide leadership when it is needed, there has not even been a glimmer of recognition that certain principles have been lost, and that, it seems to me, ought to be a cause for great concern as the cheerleaders for Guantánamo — and for the false thesis that terrorists are warriors who must be tried in war crimes trials — score another victory at Obama’s expense.

Originally published on the website of the Future for Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.